How I write my blog posts
Introduction
I’m not a writer, so it’s not that easy for me to come up with a blog post every month: creating great content is hard. In this post, I’ll talk you through what my process usually looks like — even though for me it’s different every time, I developed some techniques over time to improve my writing process.
There’s something about a blank page…
The blank page is daunting. You know how it feels when you stare at a blank screen and have no idea what to write? It’s hard! So, how do I get started? First things first — research! I usually write about my experience as a content strategy student and therefore use the information learned during the courses, but a little research goes a long way and always helps to develop my idea and start writing.
Indeed, one of the most important skills you can have as a blogger is researching. One way research helps me is by confirming my ideas by looking at different examples, and often also coming up with new ideas. I usually rely on two tools: you can guess the first one — Google search — but I have another trick in my sleeve. Lately, I have been using AI writing tools to help my develop my ideas — they are not good enough to write the post for me, but they are a nice assistant to have by my side.
Creating great content is hard
Coming up with great ideas is hard, but creating great content is even harder. There’s already so much high-quality content on almost any topic available. In fact, there’s so much content on Medium about content and strategy that I often feel like I’m drowning in it… and here I am, creating more.
Since I’m working on my own blog, I usually aim at writing about something unique about my experience for an audience who is interested in the topic. It takes me a while of searching before I decide to share my ideas with others through blogging because there are so many other people out there doing it already — and I’m not really sure my idea might be relevant for anyone besides myself, or how many people already said the same thing. I’m trying not to create unnecessary content that just contributes to more noise on the web, but with the goal of posting monthly, that is not an easy task at all.
This way, I filter and end up trashing most of the ideas I have for blog posts. The ones that pass this “test” are usually concerning unique, personal experiences and are about topics that seem not to have too much competition. Some articles come to life without passing the test: this post does not really pass the test — even though my experience is unique, there is already way too much content on the topic that is probably much better than anything I can write.
Start writing
With my research done, I move on to Word or an AI writing assistant such as copy.ai. In there, I start drafting an outline to have the different sections defined. I used to have an unstructured writing process, where I just jotted down whatever I had in my mind, but that ended up with a very time-consuming editing process trying to divide the blog post into different sections.
In my attempt to structure my writing process, for each point of the outline, I develop a list of talking points — the AI tools are great at this, giving you a bunch of points you can develop. However, to create a post that keeps the reader engaged I always try to structure a narrative in my posts — that’s something the AI can’t do. Finally, I get to do the real thing: writing! I tried letting the AI do that job, but most of the time what comes out does not make much sense… but some paragraphs come out nicely. Following the talking points and using an AI writing tool really helped me get the writing done faster. Once the first draft is done, I add an intro and an outro and then start editing until the whole thing makes sense.
Proofread. And then proofread again.
During the proofreading process, I first check my text with Grammarly, a great tool that goes much beyond spell-checking and gives complete feedback on the writing style and grammar issues. Then, a check for clarity and conciseness comes next, together with trying to keep a friendly tone and voice thought the blog post.
But the process of proofreading for me has become much more than just fixing grammar and spelling. Writing on the internet enables anyone to make their content interactive, and I try as much as possible to include multimedia content and links to other resources, or related blog posts of my fellow colleagues. I also am thinking to start using emojis and GIFs to make my text more colourful and engaging 😎
Conclusion
Even tough this is a personal reflection-in-action, I hope this post has given you an insight into my process of writing and how it is evolving. If you want to see a different perspective on how to write a structured blog post, check out Iida’s blog post about the PASTO framework.
